There are times when I think there is mass hysteria and people just aren't thinking for whatever reasons...

We see it in elections when charismatic nobody's get elected president who have absolutely no management experience....

We also see it when people buy into crazy conspiracy theories...

I've also seen it with shows and personalities who for the life of me I can't figure out the public fascination for...

I still don't get the Ledger Joker. He was just plain ANNOYING.

The Hamill Joker had class and was a truly frightening madman who would literally kill you with jokes. That's more like what the Joker was intended to be. I know because I've actually read the original Joker comics from the early 1940s and the later best stories featuring him over the years.

THAT'S the Joker, not an annoying Andy Kauffman wannabe...

Sorry, but I don't care for Chris Nolan's interpretation of Batman one bit. He should direct James Bond/Christian Bale in a Bond film NOT Batman.

Wake me up when most people realize this ISN'T Batman anymore than that awful Joel Schumacher business was. It's just as bad and completely misses the point in a way that only Frank Miller and Judd Winnick manage to pull off consistently in their comics!

Droo, I've seen that video before.

What an amazing model!

Some of the best modellers in the world are Japanese.

We can make fun of the "man in rubber suit" all we want but you have to admit the miniatures in many Japanese films are very well-made...

A few of the best Enterprise's I've seen over the years were made by some very talented Asians including a few Asian-Americans. Some of these guys have worked in Hollywood for ILM and on the Star Trek series (movies and TV) as well.

It takes real skill and a bit of madness (compulsive perfectionism) to accomplish what these guys do!

GeorgeC wrote: The Hamill Joker had class and was a truly frightening madman who would literally kill you with jokes. That's more like what the Joker was intended to be. I know because I've actually read the original Joker comics from the early 1940s and the later best stories featuring him over the years.

I do feel Ledger had some of that, particularly with the pencil-in-the-eye thing, but it should have been used much more than it was. The horror of the Joker is the grotesque things he finds funny; in TDK he does things for the "chaos" of it, but not so much humor. He burns the money for the fun of it and kills the cops for his own sick purposes, but it's never really for laughs but for some unknown reason that is never revealed. As you said this is not really what the Joker was intended to be. Nolan's vision of the Joker is simply psychotic and desperate; the only problem is that the Joker is beyond psychotic.

I do think Ledger was a great Joker, but he was all too human. Nolan's vision of him is basically a study in psychosis, but the whole point of the Joker (as was embodied in the Nicholson performance) is that you cannot even begin to understand and categorize him. The speeches about how the Joker's love of "chaos" makes him inexplicable really don't fit what we see on screen because the Joker is human and insane and therefore can be understood from that angle. Like the rest of the film, he is grounded in reality. The Nicholson/Hamill/comic book Joker is evil on an epic scale, he kills not simply because "I just do things," but because he finds it hilarious. This is what TDK misses because it's really not that kind of film, despite its other merits. It's really a character study and character studies are all about "explaining" characters and their motives...but the Batman mythos has always been the antithesis of that.

*Also, at one point TDK Joker says "And I thought my jokes were bad!" The Joker would never say this! His whole reason for being is that he thinks all his jokes are hilarious!

"That’s right, folks, it’s gonna be a Meg episode, stick around for the fun.
Here’s the clicker...no one’d blame ya.”

Though I'm certainly not the greatest TDK fan ever, I would have to say that Hamill's Joker would have been too theatrical for the tone of film Nolan was going for (right or wrong).

However, that's perhaps what the film needed: aside from the initial look, I wasn't completely won over by Ledger's performance, and I certainly don't buy this "he was so into his character" stuff that was being banded about as a reason for any depression he may or may not have had. Some friends of mine were on the stunt crew for both BB and TDK and they told me Ledger could snap in and out of character like <I>that</I>, and that between takes he wasn't a homicidal maniac.

Besides, by the time of his untimely death, the Joker was a distant memory...he was more than eight months away from that role and well into shooting Terry Gilliam's Imaginarium Of Dr Parnassus...the general public, fed by "set reports" that look like they made the movie last week, don't quite understand that a film like TDK can be a year in post between shooting and release. As such, I do stand by the fact that I think much of TDK's interest and hype was built around Ledger's death, but would say that he did invest a great amount of himself in the role to pull off a remarkable performance, even if I thought it did unbalance the movie completely.

Similar to what we were saying about Spidey 3, I'd have also liked to have had Two-Face set up as a villain near the end, ready to become a bigger opponent in a third film than he ultimately did.